Summary

The Visual Arts is recognized as the most up-to-date and wide-ranging history of art available in one volume. Now completely revised, it's more comprehensive and compelling than ever.Authors Honour and Fleming take readers from pre-history to Post-Modernism, exploring all the familiar movements and masterworks but also delving into non-Western traditions, architecture, and the decorative arts. The incisive text (incorporating new research and discoveries), more than 1,350 illustrations (nearly 20% new), maps (all redrawn), time charts (all redesigned), and sidebars (including the new "Concepts" and "Urban Development") make this an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to understand art in context.

Author Notes

Patrick Hugh Honour was born in Eastbourne, East Sussex, United Kingdom on September 26, 1927. He received a bachelor's degree in 18th-century English literature from St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. In the mid-1950's, he started writing and editing with John Fleming. For Penguin Books, they edited the series Style and Civilization. They also edited two more series for Penguin: Architect and Society and Art in Context. Together they wrote The Visual Arts: A History, The Penguin Dictionary of Decorative Arts, and The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture with Nikolaus Pevsner.

Honour wrote several books on his own including Horace Walpole, Chinoiserie: A Vision of Cathay, The Companion Guide to Venice, Romanticism, The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the American Revolution to World War I, and The Venetian Hours of Henry James, Whistler, and Sargent. Honour organized the traveling exhibition The European Vision of America for the United States Bicentennial in 1976. As a companion to the exhibition, he wrote The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time. He died on May 19, 2016 at the 88.

Booklist Review

Originally published in 2009, this most recent edition of Honour and Fleming's classic art-history text is now being marketed to a general audience at a more affordable price. With a chronology that stretches from prehistory to the present day in nearly 1,000 pages and 1,500 color and black-and-white images images, this book aims to be comprehensive, as befitting its stated goal of being exploratory rather than critical. Photography, architecture, and digital and installation art are discussed, along with traditional media, such as painting and sculpture. Unlike many art-history books, the focus here goes beyond Western art, and topics such as colonialism and indigenous art are addressed within the chronological organization rather than in separate sections or volumes. Also notable is the attention devoted to contemporary art. The final chapter, Into the Third Millennium, focuses on art from the 1980s to the early 2010s. Contributed by contemporary art historian Michael Archer, the chapter addresses recent developments from a global perspective, including sections on Postmodern Multiculturalism and Globalization, Sensation, and Spectacle. Each chapter begins with a time line that juxtaposes historical landmarks with events in the visual arts. In Context, Urban Development, and Sources and Documents boxes provide historical, religious, and cultural context and excerpts from relevant primary source documents. The book also includes a glossary, lists of further reading for each chapter, and an index. Classic art-history surveys are regularly updated but often at a significantly higher cost. At just $75, this book represents an affordable and comprehensive addition to academic, school, and public library collections.--Harmon, Lindsay Copyright 2010 Booklist

Choice Review

In this new edition (1st ed., 1982), art historians Honour and Fleming continue and supplement their ambitious and splendid attempt at a world art history in one volume. Arranged chronologically and shifting between East and West, the text sweeps over time and space--from prehistory to the present and across Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. It also ranges over painting (and other pictorial forms, such as photography), sculpture, architecture, and the so-called "minor arts" (such as pottery and textiles). The many illustrations (about a third in color) are conveniently placed near the corresponding text. The new edition includes recent discoveries (such as the prehistoric art from Chauvet cave in France) and recent areas of research (such as women and art). Each chapter has useful time charts, maps, and diagrams (e.g., architectural plans). Especially noteworthy are the inserts "Sources and Documents" (containing important primary source material) and "In Context" (short essays on specific works and themes, e.g., the Gothic Cathedral or the Shaman's Mask). New to this edition are the inserts "Concepts" (The Ideal, The Divine, Nature, Modernism) and "Urban Development" (each two full pages on urbanization or landscape architecture, e.g., 16th-century Rome or 19th-century public parks)--all being first-rate essays. General readers; undergraduate and graduate students. D. Topper; University of Winnipeg